From the Easy Chair
Art
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons
Lesson: 148-214
Genre: Speech
Track:
Dictation Name: RR161CZ190
Year: 1980s and 1990s
Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CZ190, Art, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.
[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 300, quite a number. I never imagined when I did the first one on an experimental basis that we would ever reach this number. This is October the sixth, 1993.
Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will now discuss the subject of art.
Before I get into that, by way of introduction, I want to deal with an aspect here that I think our age is particularly prone to be stupid about. Some very fine people, Libertarians, are responsible for this stupidity in that they have made the market place their god. And I have heard people that I regard as brilliant minds make the stupid statement that nothing that cannot stand in the market place has any right to existence. Well, there are a great many things that have always had to have subsidies. Among them religion. Christianity doesn’t sell its services and exist because it is good at selling itself and its services, although we do now have, I have heard of one possible approach to this by one office of the IRS namely that when you to church you are buying services with your tithe, because you are buying the protection from the weather the sanctuary affords you. You are buying the parking space outside and the pavement and the walk, the pew, the hymnals. So everything is paid for so you have no right, really, to a tax deduction. This is the idea that has been broached.
But to back up a bit, art has always had to be subsidized. Without subsidies there could be no art. The direction art has taken usually has been the direction determined by those who subsidize it. I am not saying that the artist are selling themselves, I am just saying that certain types of artists never get a chance to get off the ground.
When the Church subsidized art it produced great art.
I read a long paper just recently on Johann Sebastian Bach. He lived in a time when music was still subsidized by the Church. Whether as a composer or organist or choir master—he held various positions—he was always subsidized all his life via the Church from his teens. And all the glory of his magnificent music is a product of subsidy. The only kind of music that does not need a subsidy is that which appeals to fallen man. In our day when people are, I would say, a little more fallen than they have usually been, you have rock and roll and you have hard rock. You have the heavy metal and other types of music all degenerate. They meet the market and its qualifications. Does that make them the successful and the desirable music of our time?
So I think we ought to begin, first, perhaps, by considering the need for subsidies in the arts.
[ Scott ] Well, Hollywood subsidizes...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...music today. And a great deal else. In the graphic arts business subsidizes and generally speaking the graphic arts that business subsidizes are realistic. We have a coterie in New York in San Francisco and other places that have been subsidized, subsidizing abstract expressionist art which is an in your face art. It is a standing insult to the Christian tradition and to the Christian civilization masquerading as modernity, something new, change. Recently I talked to a man whose father was an amateur artist who in a moment of pique over the modernistic trend sent in his palette with all the mixtures of paints on the palette and it won a prize.
And I... I won’t say over the tape what the modern sculptures call the objects in the courtyard...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ... of public buildings that they place.
[ Rushdoony ] ...showing their contempt for the people.
[ Scott ] They... they do it deliberately and they have contempt for the people who will let them do it.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] So what we have here is a war against rationality in art, a war against religion in art and a war against realism in art.
[ Rushdoony ] And meaning...
[ Scott ] And... and significance. For a while the Marxists were sponsoring what they called proletarian art in which they ash can’s ghoul.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] As they showed people in rags and all that sort of thing, but they have... they have moved beyond that and the hope, of course, is that eventually all the art of the Christian centuries will be totally relegated to the grave yard.
[ Rushdoony ] The Soviet Union for a time was destroying the churches under the leadership of one commissar so there would be none of that to be contrasted to the Soviet art.
[ Scott ] It was interesting that Lunacharski who was made commissar of culture spared the ballet, the classical ballet because his mistress was a very famous dancer. So therefore the ballet, which was the epitome of aristocratic entertainment, was retained all through the Marxist post Bolshevik period, the only one, the only one of the arts. Later on Stalin wanted to restore classical music and didn’t like the cacophony that the composers were bringing up.
It is interesting to me to note that even Christian composers today give us this discordant music.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They don’t compose melodies. So the great many of the people in the world of art, beside those that are sponsored and subsidized want to be sponsored and subsidized and try to join the fashion. But the audience is walking out. The people don't want it.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And after... even after 70... well, more than 70, a hundred years, over 100 years, they have not been able, the avant has not been able to convince the people that they should like it.
[ Rushdoony ] When I went to the William Volker fund as a consultant and received a research grant to do some writing, this was in the early 60s, I had some familiarity with their work and had been influenced by one of their associated organizations, the national book foundation. I have often dreamed of having the funds to create another such group. The national book foundation tended to specialize in history and in economics. Every few weeks it would send out a review of two or four outstanding books in these fields with an enclosed card asking the person who received it—and these would be professors and students, clergymen, any person with intellectual interests who was interested—and they would receive a copy freely. You could take one or four of the books. I took a number and I found them to be exceptionally good reading. A vast number of the young men who in the 50s and 60s became conservative professors and intellectuals were brought up on those books. They had received them.
Now that was a subsidy.
[ Scott ] Sure.
[ Rushdoony ] But it accomplished a great work. So when I went to Volker I was excited by it and studied everything they had on the national book foundation and was dismayed when the trustees wiped it out while I was there, which I thought was very short sighted.
Now a great many things like that have done a great deal of good and need to be done by Christians. We need to subsidize Christians again in the arts. We need to subsidize them, the Christian writers and thinkers with books, supplying them with books.
[ Scott ] Well, there is a tremendous amount of... there is a slippage from Christian support of art in all its aspects—sculpture, painting, writing, drama—into social work.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And the churches have turned away from art into social work. They don’t appreciate that art creates the rationale, the sense of spirituality, the appreciation of beauty that is essential to maintaining the faith.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. As one writer from Switzerland in a long letter to me recently said it is a tragedy that there is no Christian art, no school for teaching them, no subsidies for them. And all we have is either anti Christian art or pseudo Christian art which has one purpose, to impress people, to lead them to a conversion, when, as he rightly pointed out, the purpose of art should be the glory of God.
[ Scott ] Yes and indirect approach of art. We are seeing the direct approach. I went through most of the book stores. Doug Murray and I went through most of the Christian book stores in Sacramento one day. I almost got diabetes. The saccharine trash...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...saccharine trash...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...was all they had.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And I remember when I walked out I thought, you know, that when George Bernanos, the French writer...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes...
[ Scott ] ...wrote The Diary of a Country Priest...
[ Rushdoony ] Priest.
[ Scott ] Now the priest died in the book, in the novel. He was poor. He was kicked around by his aristocratic patrons. He had to deal with some terrible children. He was finally diagnosed as having a terminal illness. At this point—and that was before I converted—I threw the book across the room and then hours later I went and I picked it up reluctantly because I had been told by, as it happens, that it was a great book and that I should read it and, of course, I, at that point I would have redone anything to please her, so I determined to finish the book. And by the end of the book Bernanos had convinced me that this was wonderful, that it was good. And that is a great Christian message.
I don’t know of anybody who is writing that way today.
[ Rushdoony ] Well...
[ Scott ] Or... or who would publish him.
[ Rushdoony ] As John Saunders said, the idea of a Christian film is one in which they show a church window or an open Bible or a cross or someone praying and the rest can be rubbish, trash, but that somehow makes it Christian.
[ Scott ] Well, the Christian publishing houses have a very low opinion of the mentality of their audience. They are ... they do not try. They don’t... don't try to stretch and they are not realistic. Nor does the church help. Eve the Catholic church which at one time was very active in these areas, the first films that appeared, the first cinemas were in Italy and the biblical epics came out of Italy. D. W. Griffiths picked it up from the Italians. And, for that matter, the movies here in the United States before World War I were mainly protestant. Men used to reform of their sins. They used to convert. They were Christian films. Can you imagine a Christian film today?
But, of course, the Christians have the money. They have the numbers.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] There is no reason for their absence from the scene.
[ Rushdoony ] I wish we could, as a beginning, have sufficient funds to have an artist in residence.
[ Scott ] It would be wonderful.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes, because the neglect of art by the Christian community is appalling and art is in the process of committing suicide. It has become so closely allied with everything degenerate in our culture.
[ Scott ] It is anti civilizational.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes, definitely.
[ Scott ] And it is a very strange thing, because the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany both went back to representational art after their revolution succeeded.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I have an interesting book and I have it on the floor next to my desk because I want to write about it. It is about German art under Hitler. What is very, very interesting is that the inspiration was totally Greek.
[ Scott ] The human... the human figure.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Yes, the heroic...
[ Rushdoony ] The classical....
[ Scott ] Right.
[ Rushdoony ] ...art, Greek and Roman, but especially the Greek. And this was Hitler’s requirement. And what he represented was the kind of thing that still existed when we were children, the radical emphasis in education on the Greeks and Romans as the essence of all that was good.
[ Scott ] Right.
[ Rushdoony ] So that it was virtually another Bible and Hitler subscribed to that totally.
[ Scott ] But, of course, one of the... one of the side effects of this on the part of both Hitler and the Communists was that it has been used to denigrate all representational art ever since.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes, of course, that had begun before World War I, but it certainly was accelerated by the Soviet and German favoritism to that. And that was a reason for that because one of the most vitriolic attacks of your and mine lifetime was by Marxists on Existentialism, because as one Marxian scholar told me once, he said, “There is a difference...” Now this was, oh, 30 or more years ago. He said, “There is a difference in the strictly Marxist scholarship between the Communists and the Marxists.” The Communist is one who truly believes in Socialism and a world socialist order. The Marxist is one who believes in nothing but believes in terms of expediency that a world socialist order is the best solution to the human problem. So there is on the one hand a radical cynicism and on the other hand a naïve belief in a political
salvation.
Well, to maintain that naïve position a very conservative position was taken with regard to art and to literature.
[ Scott ] Propaganda reasons.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Because they can reach a larger number of people.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And the art of that sort is more understandable and there is behind the façade, of course, an inherent contempt for the people. So give them something simple. The art of the Renaissance was interesting. First of all, it was church sponsored and it had, of course, biblical subjects, but intermingled with pagan figures, goddesses and gods, unicorns, et cetera. The ... it was almost a continuation of Dante in which Christianity and paganism was put on an equal level.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And the Reformation really threw a crimp into the development of art with the exception of poetry and ... and the writing.
You know, the clergy really belong to a certain extent in the theater. There is a great deal of theatricality in the pulpit and in the delivery and even in the appearance. And yet the pope had turned very much against the theater which hurt the faith.
[ Rushdoony ] It was Zwingli who set that example as against Calvin and Luther and who was radically followed, especially in the English speaking world. Zwingli’s influence here was very, very far reaching and very bad because he was totally distrustful of art.
[ Scott ] He was almost anti beauty.
[ Rushdoony ] He was and the ironic part is that he was a very accomplished musician.
[ Scott ] Isn’t that strange?
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. He knew the power of music as far as he was concerned. He responded to it with intensity and, therefore, his background being scholastic, he felt that true rationality would frown on any such thing.
[ Scott ] Well, music is one of the languages of God.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] I mean, the birds sing.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, we will have in the November Chalcedon Report an article about music as a language in which the song of birds is included and the writer very beautifully points out that babies and little children when they first start to talk are musical.
[ Scott ] I think everyone is musical until it is knocked out of them.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] We used to sing.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] We used to sing in school. We used to sing in busses. We used to sing all the time.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. We...
[ Scott ] Oh, I haven’t heard anybody sing in years.
[ Rushdoony ] No. No.
[ Scott ] ...in years.
[ Rushdoony ] Any group in a car or in a bus...
[ Scott ] Right.
[ Rushdoony ] ... that starts singing...
[ Scott ] Yeah.
[ Rushdoony ] And that is gone. I don't know whether you can remember, Mark, when we would get in a car to go anyplace the girls would start singing and the four of them with beautiful voices. We would all sing.
[ M Rushdoony ] That is probably why I am not musical. I didn’t like it. With four older sisters they were rather overpowering and I guess I {?} something. I was in a minority and I didn’t want to hear it so I... I don’t like singing in cars or small places, I mean confined places to this day.
[ Rushdoony ] We drove up to Sonora once, the whole family, oh, that must have been in the early 60s. I think it was on the fourth of July. I was going to preach at Sonora. And we sang most of the way.
[ M Rushdoony ] You mentioned about preachers and preaching is theatrical. Perhaps... I went to fundamentalist schools and, to a certain extent, they have been rather very anti arts, especially of dance is sexual, therefore, you know, and the Pietism came in. That is... that was out and the theaters were ... it was subsidizing an evil industry so theater was out, et cetera. And I think the fundamentalist preachers who were very Arminian, they really got into not only... they didn’t get... there wasn’t just oratory. It was histrionics, even buffoonery, I think, to a certain extent. That is how I always felt about it. And they saw that there was a manipulative influence there to that and perhaps that is one of the reasons they used that art as a form of mind control. Their, what they called preaching, was, I think, a kind of mass psychology and a theology.
[ Scott ] So...
[ M Rushdoony ] Perhaps they were a sort of anti it because they... the used it in that regard.
[ Scott ] Sort of a jealousy, a competitiveness. There is a lot of competitiveness, of course, in people anyway no matter what they are in. The psychiatrists, for instance, are very competitive with writers. They... they take the... Freud’s pattern. Freud distorted his literary, his cases and made literary narratives out of them. And he ... he concealed the nature of his clientele or patients, however you want to call them. The Countess M, for instance, whose name was anything but noble to elevate and to give the reader the impression that he was dealing with the aristocracy with the Viennese or the Austrian aristocracy of his day when, in fact, he was dealing with his own set. And it read... he read very much in my estimation, like a daring novelist of his time, especially because he brought in more sex than was permissible in the literature of his day and that was one of the great attractions of Freud’s books.
I remember seeing some of those types of case histories on coffee tables in the late 20s when I was a boy in the social set that my mother belonged to. And the ... and... and we find this jealousy of writers fairly common. An awful lot of people feel that they could be writers if they just had the time. And...
[ M Rushdoony ] Well, even in the film industry especially in the 50s and early... and 60s I would... watching talk shows. It was an obvious jealousy and contempt of movie people for television people because they could see the impact of television and the influence of television and even though it was really the same medium, or similar medium, they were very jealous and they denigrated the ... the television industry as inferior.
[ Rushdoony ] In recent years some evangelical schools like Bob Jones University and Pensacola College have been giving a renewed emphasis to the arts. However, I think we have got to begin earlier than that and I trust, as the Christian school movement gets stronger and weathers this present economic crisis that is going to strike the nation, they can do more with regard to the arts.
I am glad that our school, that the students do very well in their art work at the county fair. We are not too good in music, but we don’t have the talent there and we have leadership, but this is something that has we grow, possibly, we can remedy. But we are a long, long ways from the kind of thing that existed in Bach’s day.
It is interesting that in Bach’s day there were two great musicians who were confronted with the fact that the world was changing and that there would be no place for Christian art, that the nobles and the courts were going to subsidize art and the churches would do it less and less partly because the church in Europe at that time was a state church. And if the state withdrew the subsidy from one sphere and took it to its courts then the art world and the church would whither away.
The two musicians who were faced with this were Bach and Handel and Handel shifted his emphasis, realistically, to the world of opera, to the court. But Johann Sebastian Bach looked down the generations and he felt this is the only god honoring art. And he stuck with it. He felt he had a mission. Ironically, after he died within not too many years he was a forgotten figure. And for very different reasons than his religious faith he was revived by the romantic musicians. They recognized his genius and ability.
But the reason we don’t have any Bachs today, we don’t have anyone to subsidize them.
[ Scott ] Well, that is true. We also have ... it is beginning to come back, though, in a different kind of way. I went down to see what really is a modern opera, The Phantom of the Opera. I can’t think of the composer’s name off hand. It is a three name... but it is an opera. It is treated as though it isn’t, but it actually is. It is an opera and it is a very understandable narrative, wonderful opera. The music lifts you right up and it has got all the ingredients. Andrew Lloyd Weber. Now Andrew Lloyd Weber has been moving in this direction and he is detested by Broadway and by all the American critics of the theater. Every one of the reviewers hate him with an abiding passion and all of his productions have been sold out for as long as they appear. The only ... the only people who like them are the people.
They... Broadway hates it because it has a Christian under pinning and it is melodic and it is theatrical. It is a return of the modern operatic form, you might say. It is not... it is confuse of musical comedy, but musical comedy is Broadway at its worst, trivial plots, unbelievable people, everybody kicking their legs up, nonsense. I can’t stand musical comedy and Andrew Lloyd Weber, from what I have seen so far is answering a need in the audience which the audience, of course, is not even aware that it needs.
[ Rushdoony ] He is the greatest money maker in Britain and the United States.
[ Scott ] They never play his music on the American air. It is... it is black listed, unofficially.
[ Rushdoony ] Yeah. I... I would say he is semi Christian, because there is no theology there.
[ Scott ] Oh, not at all.
[ Rushdoony ] But it is...
[ Scott ] But his instincts.
[ Rushdoony ] ... a step in the right direction.
[ Scott ] His... his instincts are in that direction. I mean a person without any theology I am positive and ... but generally speaking the Christians do not have any presence today in the world of art. And considering the fact that they out number all other groups in the United States what can we say? Whose fault is it?
The only way that you can change anything is to join it and change it from inside. You cannot change the world by criticizing it.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, an important part of the whole background of Christian art is that the tithe was paid to the Levites. The tithe was 10 percent of a person’s income. One percent went to the priests for the temple and its worship. The Levites provided the musicians. So the nine tenths of the tithe they retained provided for the arts. They provided for basically instruction. The Levites, according to Deuteronomy 33:10 had a calling to be the instructors of Israel. So they had a variety of functions that they were to perform in the country.
Today we have a larger number of people who believe that the tithe must be given to the local storehouse, the church, as they identify it. Now that is not biblical and I regularly get letters rebuking me because something I say makes clear that I feel that the tithe goes to groups that are doing the Lord’s work outside the church, not necessarily within the church. And what these people fail to realize is that historically tying the tithe to the church, storehouse tithing, as it is called, is nonsense. The storehouse in Israel and in colonial and early American history was a barn, a local barn where livestock and farm produce were taken to be sold as a group for the money to go to the charities designated by the farmer.
When Rome, the Church of Rome, the Catholic Church tied tithing to the local parish, it created the Reformation because up until that point if the local church was not preaching as the people wanted, the Word of God faithfully they quit going. They gave their money to a monastery or they gave it to a wandering preacher and there were lots of wandering preachers in the Middle Ages, to anybody except the local priest.
Well, that reformed them in a hurry. And that is how the reforms took place. Because it is a great incentive to reform when nobody appears...
[ Scott ] No, darn right.
[ Rushdoony ] And they are not supporting you.
[ Scott ] Right.
[ Rushdoony ] And you have from the bishop the right to that pulpit, but no money.
[ Scott ] Yeah.
[ Rushdoony ] And the bush bishop isn’t happy because if you are not getting it, he is not getting it and Peter at Rome is not getting his pence. So the explosion, the Reformation was due to the tying of the tithe to the local parish church. And now Protestants are doing that all over again.
[ Scott ] So the organization overtakes the purpose.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes, exactly. And what we need is a restoration of the tithe to its full orbed purpose. Music should have an important part in it. In the Bible it has a central part. You go through the book of Psalms, the sons of Korah, to an instrument of 10 strings, it says...
[ Scott ] Well, you had David.
[ Rushdoony ] ... in the subtitles.
[ Scott ] Yeah David.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] You had David dancing. They would throw him out of the church today, wouldn’t they?
[ Rushdoony ] But the singers were provided by the Levites out of the tithe. So we have lost a whole world there.
[ Scott ] Well, this is a breakdown between the Church and the community, because, you know, it is... it is... my own writing, for instance, I can’t help it. I write mainly for those who are still lost. And consequently I usually write about things that are happening in the world to remind the Christians who read me that there is a big world out there.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, one of the problems in the arts, too, is gigantism. And ...
[ Scott ] That is the organization bigger.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. This began with the Romantics. The orchestra prior to the Romantic movement had a limited number of musicians. There was a remarkable conductor who spent his later years in Los Angeles and he had a {?} as he called it. He would play pre Romantic music exclusively and his symphony was breathtaking in its beauty and the power. It replaced noise as the Romantics stressed it with a subtlety and a power that would fill a concert hall.
And I think the ultimate in Gigantism was Hector Berliotz.
[ Scott ] Well, that is true. I have Requiem.
[ Rushdoony ] Then you know what I am talking about.
[ Scott ] Oh, absolutely. It just comes on like a great thunderstorm, you know. Personally I prefer chamber music.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I think everyone who is interested in music should listen to Berliotz’ Requiem once to see what Gigantism leads to.
Beethoven was a gigantist.
[ Scott ] Yeah, he was. Yes, he was. And that is where Mozart was better.
[ Rushdoony ] But you had canvases painted as a result of the Romantic movement.
[ Scott ] Oh, I ... I...
[ Rushdoony ] ...that were...
[ Scott ] You walked through the Louvre one of these days, Rush, and you have... you walk to canvases the were from floor to ceiling 50 feet long.
[ Rushdoony ] We saw a few of them in London, do you remember?
[ Scott ] Yes, yes. More than life sized.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And they were popular in the United States.
[ Scott ] Well, this is when the televangelists are.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They pride themselves on having a congregation of millions.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Who don’t have to put their shoes on to listen to them. And it ... it passes like a summer rain.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, in the early part of the last century and perhaps later you had, I think they were called dioramas.
[ Scott ] Oh, yes. Yes.
[ Rushdoony ] Artists...
[ Scott ] They still have those. They still have those.
[ Rushdoony ] This...
[ Scott ] I haven’t seen one in 20 years or so, but they exist.
[ Rushdoony ] ...who would go from place to place with these enormous canvases...
[ Scott ] Yes and you go right a round them.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And people would go in paying to see them and marvel at them. The whole idea that was appealing was the enormity of it all. Canvases, pictures, not just by the yard or rod, but almost ...
[ Scott ] Almost by the mile.
[ Rushdoony ] Almost by the mile.
And we still perpetuate that in a great many things that the art world favors. Well, of course, it is not as operas were in the early Romantic era. Sometimes 12 hours long in one or two dramatic cases with elephants and Calvary charges on a huge state, things that only a king or a kaiser or an emperor could put on.
[ Scott ] But don’t forget. The audience was raised in silence. The audience went to those spectacles. It was a spectacle. It was like a circus, a three ring circus, you know. Now the audience is surrounded by babble. It is already inundated. It is beaten to death and there is no rest.
John Cage, after all, made a reputation by stopping the... the orchestra, a very strange kind of thing.
[ Rushdoony ] Symphony in silence, nothing.
[ Scott ] And not too long ago, I understand, the Museum of Modern Art had an exhibit in which a totally white canvas was shown as a work of art, nothing on it at all, just white paint.
We are reaching the lunatic stage.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And it goes back to McCauley who said, “Those who have no talent show their sores.” All kinds of sickness spectacles and documentaries of suffering.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, it was ... what was his name? Mario Praz, the romantic agony who described what was happening in literature and in the world of art generally and this was 60, 70 years ago, that from an emphasis on happy emotions or sad emotions of a noble sort, you went down hill steadily to the bizarre and the perverted.
[ Scott ] Yes.
[ Rushdoony ] ...until art became {?}.
[ Scott ] Yes, which it is.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Which it is. There is... there is a substratum of Sadism, of cruelty, of murder.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And one of the results is what a recent writer that I read called hard children. The inability to believe in love or to express it or to accept it. And he made a comparison between the American family and the Mexicans. He said, “You cross the border and you still see open affection. You don’t see that here.” This its he effect of bad art.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes.
[ Scott ] The influence of art is tremendous.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] And it can misdirect as well as direct, degrade as well as uplift.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, when you realize the remarkably fine art that Bach produced and you wonder how man in one lifetime could write all that music because for most musicians today if they did nothing but copy Bach it would take more than a lifetime for them. He must have just dashed it off rapidly. And we know we have lost a great deal of his things. He was producing new music regularly for choirs and organs. And all of it magnificent because it would... he was so totally imbued with that music that he could not help but produce it.
I think San Saens stated it beautifully when he was asked about his music and was it hard or difficult to write and so on. He regarded that with amusement. He said, “I produce like... music like a pear tree produces pears.”
[ Scott ] Well, it is interesting. Literature has been affected. There was a very good book when I was young, Jean Christoth by Romaine Roland.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] About a musician, a composer. So a very thick book.
[ Rushdoony ] Very thick.
[ Scott ] And... but it was a great book. It made his reputation internationally. He never came close to it again. And it was about the world of music. It was about a ... a composer. I have forgotten now who he modeled it on. We don’t have that sort of literature anymore.
[ Rushdoony ] It was a well written book, but I didn't care for it.
[ Scott ] I liked it.
[ Rushdoony ] It was too romantic. The character and everything about it and I ... I very early soured on the romantic movement and Roland was very much a part of it, which is not to detract from his abilities and you are right. He never came close to it again.
[ Scott ] But we don’t have books of that level.
[ Rushdoony ] No.
[ Scott ] We don’t have books that talk about high points of culture. And we notice that even in the television ads the models are low level. The accents are low level.
[ Rushdoony ] Well...
[ Scott ] It is as though there is no upper level.
[ Rushdoony ] One of the things that Joanna’s boy, my grandson Daniel is doing is collecting and reading G. A. Henty’s books. Very carefully researched. A number of adults who, since I have mentioned Henty, have gotten interested in him include the Hittons. The children are very familiar with them. And, of course, Clint Miller. And Clint Miller has very keen eye for good art in any sphere.
[ Scott ] He is an antiquarian.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] He traces history by its artifacts.
[ Rushdoony ] Well... well, there is no comparable writing now to what Henty did. And yet how many books did he turn out? Sixty or 80 something like that. He had, I understand, a team of researchers, so if he decided to write, for example, one of his great ones, I think, In Freedom’s Cause about Sir William Wallace and his war against the English in the days of Bruce, he had all his facts carefully provided him by his research team.
[ Scott ] Well, we have Churchill used a research team and we also have Michener whose research teams were famous. Michener’s problem, though, was that he would put a 20th century figure...
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] ...in the middle of a 16th century context wondering why women didn’t have the vote.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The researchers today go after the clothing and the artifacts and not the spirit of things.
[ Scott ] That is right. They... they simply ... but they don’t give the audience a chance to realize that people had different viewpoints, that the past ... well, whoever it was that first said it, the past is a foreign country, a different way of looking at things.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] Much more interesting than different times.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, Sir Walter Scott brought out things about the medieval era that only specialists in those particular fields had known about.
[ Scott ] Well, he was a mass ... mass writer, mass popularity. Well, you read anything. I had to research the child labor committees archives at one point about 30 odd years ago. And it was one of the first non profit foundations to be created and it was sponsored by Theodore Roosevelt among other things and it was, of course, against child labor. They succeeded everywhere excepting in agriculture up until recent years.
The level of their publications with post graduate. I don’t really think most professors today could read them and certainly couldn't reproduce them and yet this was what they put out as popular literature in 1905.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] So Sir Walter Scott is beyond the average reader.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] So is Dickens, I believe today.
[ Rushdoony ] And among the American writers Cooper and, oh, the author of Ichabod Crane.
[ Scott ] Oh, yes. I can’t think of his name off hand either.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ M Rushdoony ] Washington Irving.
[ Rushdoony ] Washington Irving.
[ Scott ] Washington Irving.
[ Rushdoony ] Thank you, Mark. Yeah.
[ Scott ] But I do remember Cooper and The Spy, particularly.
[ Rushdoony ] Well, Washington Irving did some remarkable work but it is not commonly known today and if he had had a professorial title some of this things would be regarded as classics. For example, he wrote on the Hudson Bay Company. And it is one of the great classics in American writing, an historical work, a magnificent thing. There are things like that that he wrote that are no longer read.
[ Scott ] Well...
[ Rushdoony ] Not even his Ichabod Crane and the...
[ Scott ] No, the fortunes of Spooky Hollow.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes.
[ Scott ] They are not read. They are not in school libraries. We have Judy Bloom on menstruation. We have things of that sort.
[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I recall the delight we took in Rip Van Winkle.
Well, our time is about over. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.
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